PG&E substation in the Oakland hills, October 2019. Intentional power outages such as the massive blackouts that cut off electricity to 2 million people in PG&E’s service territory recently are an “untenable” long-term game plan and PG&E has already begun work to curb such wide-ranging shutoffs amid wildfire hazards.

Intentional power outages such as the massive blackouts that recently cut off electricity to 2 million people in Northern California and the Bay Area are an “untenable” long-term game plan and Pacific Gas & Electric has already begun work to curb such wide-ranging shutoffs amid wildfire hazards, the utility told state regulators Thursday night.

PG&E issued a letter to top state regulators as well as Gov. Gavin Newsom and submitted to the Public Utilities Commission a 16-page action plan for how the embattled power provider intends to reduce the scope and duration of future preemptive power shutdowns.

“We understand that the size and scope of this event are untenable in the long-term,” William Johnson, PG&E’s chief executive officer, wrote in a letter to PUC President Marybel Batjer, referring to last week’s mass outages. “Events such as this cannot become the status quo in California.”

Alarmed by the grim prospect that windstorms could damage equipment and whip sparks from power lines into disastrous infernos, PG&E cut off electricity to 738,000 customers in 34 counties, including eight of the nine Bay Area counties.

“We ask our customers, their families, and our local and state and leaders to keep in mind the statistic that matters the most: There were no catastrophic wildfires,” Johnson wrote in the letter to the PUC Thursday night.

PG&E executives were summoned to appear Friday in San Francisco before the five members of the state PUC for what was expected to be a grilling about the company’s blunders and lack of preparation for issuing information regarding the deliberate power outages.

“Failures in execution, combined with the magnitude of this power shutoff event, created an unacceptable situation that should never be repeated,” PUC Commission President Batjer wrote in a letter on Oct. 14 to PG&E’s CEO.

PG&E, in its response Thursday night, outlined its responses to 36 separate issues that the PUC raised regarding the intentional power cutoffs. The company said it had completed the work required to address six of the issues, and intended to address all 36 issues by next year’s fire season.

Newsom has also harshly criticized PG&E for mismanagement, suggesting that the utility has systematically placed profits over safety. “Californians should not pay the price for decades of PG&E’s greed and neglect,” the governor wrote in a letter to PG&E executives earlier this week.

PG&E’s CEO acknowledged to the PUC that the company had failed to adequately communicate with customers both before and during the power outages. was guilty of a failure to communicate in connection with the deliberate power outages.

“Information flow to customers” needs “significant improvement,” Johnson wrote in his letter. “Many customers were left without the critical information they needed during the power shutoff event.”

PG&E’s website buckled under and collapsed during the power outages, a failure that was “a major area of frustration,” Johnson acknowledged in the letter.

Despite the criticism, PG&E maintained that the power shutoffs were necessary to avoid destructive wildfires this month.

“Had the company not made the difficult decision to move forward with a power shutoff, a much different event could have occurred,” Johnson said.

However, PG&E should have already been poised to avoid massive deliberate power outages had it spent ratepayer funds wisely over the decades, opined Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network, a consumer group.

“If PG&E had spent the billions of dollars that ratepayers gave them to trim the trees, harden the system, maintain their electrical equipment, they wouldn’t have to shut off the power,” Toney said.

Alameda County Fire Department crews are at the scene of a fire that started about 5:30 p.m. Friday at the historic Lorenzo Theater at 16080 Hesperian Blvd. in the unincorporated community of San Lorenzo.